Yesterday night, after the football match(Germany-Wales, just in case you missed it
), they showed a pretty shocking, but interesting documentation about the religious undertones of the US election campaign. The original English title of the documentation was "Jesus Politics" by Ilan Ziv.
http://www.presseportal.de/pm/7840/1263704/zdf
http://www.jesuspoliticsthemovie.com/
Was pretty balanced and also showed how religious groups claim successful candidates, as well as the other way around.
I am an atheist down to the subatomic level of my being, living in one of the most religious cities in the one of the most religious countries in the world. As must be painfully obvious by now, I’m also someone who spends a lot of time thinking about history, political philosophy and practical politics.
Twenty years ago, I had a fairly one-dimensional view of the kind of material covered in that film – I saw a rising theocracy, and was ready to ally myself with just about anybody who would oppose it. That’s changed, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I’ve come to realize that the rise of religious politics in the US has been largely a matter of reaction to what I have come to see as unreflective over-reaching by the secular left in America in culture and politics. The disdainful attitude toward the traditional values of fairly normal people in the center of the American political and cultural landscape shown by those who were in control of American culture for three decades created a deep, powerful sense of being personally assaulted among tens of millions of Americans. Even if the leftist cultural elites hadn’t had any influence at all on politics and public policy, this would have created the conditions for a dangerous reaction.
But the problem went much farther and deeper than just creating a mass culture of insulting disdain. For a long time, policies seeped into law that huge portions of the American people found very threatening. “The 1968 Generation” of cultural and political actors, mentored by what I call “The 1932 Generation,” went way too far, way too fast for a lot of people in America. And they did it in a way that was strategically and tactically stupid, because it ignored the reality that they had left behind a very large portion of the American population, and their words and actions expressed nothing but hostility toward those people.
Setting aside who may have been right or wrong in this brewing culture war, the result was inevitable. To use a term from Marxist theory in a little different way than it was originally intended, you can’t “seize the commanding heights” and begin to control things in a democracy unless you either appease or crush those who oppose you. (Note that Marx had it exactly wrong – the “commanding heights” aren’t the means of production of material goods, but rather the means of production of cultural expression – the ’68 generation had the latter, but by and large not the former.) Eventually, revolutionaries who act this way will face a reaction at the ballot. And that’s what happened.
Thus, whenever I see something like this film, I feel that those who are so frightened of the religious right have no one to blame but themselves. They rushed ahead of themselves and behaved as if they had the whole thing won, when in fact they didn’t. They began their victory dance way too soon, and have been paying the price ever since.
Doesn't it also include trading loans?
